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"The Best Art In The World"
From the Octopus to the Rainforest, 2024, oil on linen, 54 X 14 inches Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery
Maureen O’Leary at Untitled Miami
By DAVID JAGER January 18, 2025
Occupying a booth at Untitled at Art Miami for the Cristin Tierney gallery, Maureen O’Leary paints landscapes inspired by her trips to Puerto Rico or from around her Long Island Studio. Deceptively forthright and simple in their form and conception, O’Leary advances an argument for visual pleasure for pleasure’s sake. She relies on aleatoric line, pleasing amorphous forms, and sumptuous color that saturates the whole in organic manner. She also excels at marrying familiarity with sudden elements of compositional and formal surprise.
This particular collection of images are tall, narrow affairs. O’Leary states they are inspired by Roman columns or vertical friezes. The vertical format allows her to explore a certain continuity within the natural world, especially the world of the ocean and the jungle, which appears to be her main preoccupation. The eye is allowed to travel from the root to top of a jungle forest tree, and glimpse at the sky, or travel from the depths of the ocean to the top of a mountain above it.
She says as much in the title from the series “From the Octopus to the Rainforest”, which spans from a lone octopus in the ocean at the bottom, up past the beach, above a tangle of freeways, and finally to the top of the lush forested mountain, past another expanse of ocean, and finally to a blue green mountain crowning it, in flattened, almost fisheye lensed perspective. She has used a similar technique in her earlier portrayals of landscape and interiors, flattening the perspective so that more detail can be included.
The effect is convivial and lively, it provides an all-encompassing slice of the island, beginning with the single octopus in its title, who appears to be swimming up to a couple strolling along the beach. O’Leary’s talent for compositional balance is in evidence even as she shrinks the whole of the island into an almost self-contained world of its own imagining. The pink stripe of the man’s swimming trunks is echoed by a fuchsia billboard farther up in the paintings middle, and is further carried, like a musical refrain, by two shell pink clouds floating above the dark green mountain at its top.
Night Ferns, 2024, oil on linen, 36 X 12 inches, courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery
“Night Ferns” is a brooding inverse of this sunlight world, with slender tree trunks rising vertically out of dark purple to black foliage. The trunks, mysteriously tinged with orange, are hard to scale until the purple stretch of night road, visible in aerial perspective at the bottom, becomes visible, along with a car trundling along guided by its headlights. This is when the towering height of the Ceiba trees and the ferns nestled around them become evident, in an effect that is almost ominous. Far above them, in equally dreamlike perspective, we see a cabin with an open window, and above it an almost cobalt night sky. The smudgy, light stained outlines of tropical vegetation are reminiscent of another painter hailing from tropical paradise, Peter Doig.
With her use of bold questing line and saturated color, O’Leary is no doubt deeply informed by elements of Fauvism. But there is a folkloric element to her vision as well, a talent for childlike and imaginative simplification that implies an indigenous or mythical view of the natural world. She has in fact cited the art of Nu-Chat-Nulth West coast Indians as an inspiration. In this view, nature is not so much a phenomenon to be objectively described, but rather celebrated as a blossoming microcosm, as a self-contained world unto itself.
Her painting “The Puerto Rico Trench” is probably the best example of this. It is marvellously naive, verging on magical realism, but it would be wrong to ascribe any primitivism to it. It also demonstrates paintings power to encompass flights of the imagination, as it extends our eyes into imaginary depths of an underwater canyon impossible in any other manner. Yet she manages to whimsically convey the depth of an entire ecosystem. The sea creatures, from tubeworms to snailfish up to box jellyfish and humpback whales, are all enumerated and included in a fanciful tribute that owes as much to the naturalistic imagination as it does to marine life. The sea for instance, is the color of pink coral, while the sky atop is the color of a palm shoot.
Yet when addressing a view from a window, as in “Grackle of the Sidewalk”, her modernist sensibility shines through, with its palm tree with nested yellows and greens and Nabi pink parking lot. The grackle of the title, however, sits almost totemically at the canvases bottom, within the frame of the window. O’Leary seems to relish this tension between Modernism, which she wears elegantly and lightly, and a more folkloric sensibility, closer to Caribbean Island art.
It was Matisse who said, famously and in a statement misconstrued by nearly everyone, that art should be ‘like a good armchair’. What he failed to say was how much labor and careful thought was involved in producing his deceptively serene visual paeans to the Mediterranean. I suspect that similarly intense and involved processes undergird the work of Maureen O’Leary, who seems devoted to conveying the visual pleasures of Puerto Rico with lyricism, whimsy, perhaps even joy. WM
David Jager is an arts and culture writer based in New York City. He contributed to Toronto's NOW magazine for over a decade, and continues to write for numerous other publications. He has also worked as a curator. David received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2021. He also writes screenplays and rock musicals.
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